I'm going to be descriptive because once I found out how it's done I was absolutely fascinated.

Let's star with the avatar. When you join for free, you design your own avatar. it's a plain body, male or female, you dress it, you design the clothes, how short, how long, how tight, how loose. You design the shoes, how high the heels, you put on socks or not. You put on skirt or pants.

You design your hair, your face, your nose. To the tips of your ears. When you design your avatar it brings up the various pieces of the body and you have a slide which you slide from left to right, which gives you a short body or a long body, short ears, long ears...............it's the same for clothes or anything on your body. That's how you determine the exact size. By sliding the little thing back and forth. When you have created our body. You click on save and there is your little avatar (a representative of you in SL).

Now if you decide to do the sex thing, you teleport to a place where you can do this. Because you have a free basic account, your avatar looks like a manniquin. Very robotic. There are countless ways to have sexual adventures. Any place; you go you will see blue little balls and pink little balls. If you are female, you click on the pink and your avatar will assume a female position. People date in Second LIfe so people come in as couples and their avatars go on dates, go to dinner, make love etc. But when they are making love, it's not real looking. It's like watching two manniquins make love. You know it's not real because the movements are always the same no matter where you go,

It's fun to look at for a while but then you realize the main thing that these people back at home on their computers are doing is typing in text.
So the main thing about a free account is, it's kind of like text sex chat.. when you look on the screen, you can actually laugh because it's manniquins going at it.

HOWEVER......... and here's where it changes. When you pay for stuff on Second Life. You can pay for a new body. You can customize that body so that it looks completely human. Very tiny, but very human looking. I was standing at a beach on some island having jus teleported to various locations because the graphics are absolutely so amazing, you think you are at an actual beach. As the waves were rolling in, some woman appeard out of nowhere and she was dressed in the flowing outfit, with a tiara, and jewerly and black high heels (she looked absolutely nothing like my avatar). I said Hi, your outfit is gorgeous and she explained that she designs avatars and costumes in second life and she makes a living that way. But people pay many lindens to look like her.

Then I teleported to other place and I saw many many men and women who actually looked like men and women. Then, and this answers Liza Jane's question about how avatars can actually have real sex?. When you look human in second life, you also design your avatar to move like a human.

I saw a blanket on the floor of some beach. I had no idea what this blanket did but there was a sign over the blanket that said 50 lindens for 15 minutes. Now all I saw was an empty blanketg. Well two human looking avatars sat down, laid down and did what two people in love would do. And it was completely human looking. Never saw such a thing in all my life.

I then understood that there are people like myself who go to Second life because we are curious, maybe we want to do the free slots, and we have an avatar that looks like a manniquin. Then there are the others (PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INTO COMPUTER CODES, MACROS, WHATEVER). and want to look like humans with spectacular costumes and they go to bars and drink, and dance (looks real too), make love like the real thing. I went dancing once, laughed my head off.

So Second Life will be a big hit for the people who actually prefer to live their lives in a virtual world. Fascinating believe me.

Believe me, I just gave you a really good interpretation of Second Life.

be well

Melody